Virtual Mechanics SiteSpinner Pro

To use SiteSpinner Pro, you need a bit of experience - and a lot of patience

For

Flexible

Powerful

Against

Needs some knowledge to get the most out of it

Templates a bit dated

Rather than going out of its way to appeal to new users, SiteSpinner Pro sticks to a plain and no-nonsense approach. We found that how well you get on with it really depends on your previous experience of creating websites.

If you're confident making websites and want to get started straight away then you'll appreciate SiteSpinner Pro's straightforward design. If you're new to website design, however, you may feel lost when presented with a blank page and lots of unfamiliar tools.

We found that making a website from scratch took a great deal longer than with the other programs. There are plenty of tools to use when creating a website, and they let us add advanced features without the need to enter any code, but they weren't labelled brilliantly.

We had to spend some time experimenting with each one before we understood what it could do. The level of detail and control you have over various actions, behaviours and objects is excellent, and SiteSpinner Pro gave us far more scope for designing and editing a website than the other tools on test.

This freedom comes at a price though, and you should expect to spend a lot longer making a working website using this program.

SiteSpinner Pro offers the ability to create a website from templates, but none of them look great and some are quite outdated. We don't mind a bit of depth and complexity to our website creation tools, but after using the drag-and-drop simplicity of some of the other programs, it did feel to us at times like a bit of a slog as we clicked through a number of menus and entered values into poorly labelled boxes to implement a feature that only took a few seconds in other products.

There's no doubting that this is a powerful web creation package, and if you have the time and resources available to invest in using SiteSpinner Pro to its full potential, your patience will pay dividends.

However, if you want to create a fully functioning website with as little hassle as possible then Xara Web Designer 7 Premium is a better choice.